We did not entertain the idea of having a child until we were both into our 40’s. By entertain, I don’t mean we waited, or tried without success, or suffered miscarriages, or even coveted other peoples cute kids. I mean we decidedly did not want children. period.

As you may already know, being childless lends itself to focusing on two things, your career and hanging out with others who are childless. Our friends fell into 3 categories:

• Childless by choice, with NO desire to procreate, adopt or waste your time and money on anything other than yourself.
  
  
  Considerably younger, with the attitude and energy to spare. Their credo is: “Who needs sleep? I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
  
  Considerably older. Some of these folks fell into the Childless by choice category and never left, others had raised a family and were now empty nesters. Either way they didn’t have responsibilities at home to hold them back from doing things at the spur of the moment, like dropping large chunks of money on things with little intrinsic value, going out to eat or traveling.



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Having suddenly woke one day to decide we’d like to be a “family”, not just a “couple” you can imagine the surprise and confusion suffered by some of our friends that we would even consider a...gasp....child?!? Oh sure the forced smiles and congratulatory hugs were neatly placed, but sincerity was somewhat lacking.

Some thought we were joking. How could we, dyed in the wool kid snubbers, actually go back on our word and share the rest of our natural lives with a child? They laughed, then the joke was on them as they realized we were dead serious. The first words out of one friends mouth was “don’t expect me to babysit”, as if.....puh-leeze!....Our current and former friend base consists of several I will characterize as militantly anti-child, and we were thought to be “betraying” them by leaving the “club of childlessness”. Funny, I don’t remember signing the “musketeer clause” in our friendship agreement.

Obviously as you get older, fewer and fewer people your own age are or remain childless. We now face the interesting prospect of forming completely new alliances, mostly with people who are also parents. This is a novel concept for us, and we are somewhat scared and cautiously optimistic because most parents with toddlers are old enough to be *our* children. Fortunately the number of first time older parents is ever increasing as well as couples adopting after they have already raised a family, so maybe there is hope for us after all...wanna be my friend?